


Normal

by veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom



Category: Divergent - All Media Types, Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Blow Jobs, Boys In Love, Break Up, Breaking Up & Making Up, Come Eating, Come Swallowing, Crossdressing, Crossdressing Kink, Cutting, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Eating Disorders, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, First Time Bottoming, Fluff, Fucked Up, Gay, Gay Sex, Groping, Hand Jobs, Heartbreak, High School, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Manipulative Peter, Melodrama, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, One Shot, One-Sided Relationship, Peter is a Little Shit, Post-Break Up, Public Display of Affection, Read this if you hate Drew the entire thing is just him suffering, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Fantasy, Smut, Suicidal Thoughts, This is basically like a fetish/kink buffet, Underage Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Weight Gain, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 12:42:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12481828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom/pseuds/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom
Summary: With him, anything is normal.





	Normal

**Author's Note:**

> juuuust a quick warning
> 
> if you couldn't tell from the tags this fic is anything but the title. we're talking fantasizing about performing crude sex-change operations on yourself to win back a guy who is incredibly emotionally abusive to the point where he broke up with you and sent you spiraling into a mental breakdown just so he could come back 4 months later to 'fix' you levels of fucked up
> 
> plus i wrote like 90% of this on complete autopilot and it's probably awful
> 
> so yeah maybe dont read this
> 
> idk

He invites you over to help with his homework.  
  
If you weren't so naïve, so willing to trust whatever he tells you at face value, perhaps it would stand out, a red flag. No one thinks you're smart. He's never thought of you as smart. And  _you've_  never thought of yourself as smart. At best, to him, you're a boy who can be pushed around and shaped and convinced to do anything he wants you to, for reasons that are unknown to him and too humiliating for you to admit to anyone but yourself. At worst, what everyone else thinks about you, even those who call you their friend, is true, and you are weird and unintelligent and a codependent enabler of whatever he wants to do, no matter how wrong or stupid or evil.  
  
But he asked you for something, and you, like always, would be more than happy to deliver. It's not in your nature to say no. Not to him. His hair is dark and shiny and perpetually tousled, in a way that is just messy enough to call to mind a big, beefy lumberjack or a slick hustler occupying the darkest corner of a seedy downtown bar, both tropes of men you find attractive enough to cast him as in your deepest sexual fantasies. His voice is like a soft spring rain rattling stones on the shore of a crystalline lake, still as ice and glimmering like it, too, even beneath the weight of the storm's unfurling blackness. And whenever you fall down, you always seem to collapse right where he can pick you back up, even if he doesn't intend to.  
  
There's more than enough reasons for you to pine for him. There's even more reasons than those for you, as his best friend, to help him out, even if you don't believe you'll be much help with your own consistent low marks in school and general overarching disinterest in anything that isn't Peter Hayes.  
  
He takes your broken wings and he mends them with his touch. He picks you up and he sees your flaws, but while you are together, in each other's presence, you feel as flawless as he is, and sometimes, that is enough to leave you feeling perfect, and sometimes, you feel overjoyed but never perfect, because no matter what you do, how hard you try, you can't become half as beautiful as he is. Any excuse to see someone who lifts you up like that, makes you beyond what you are, is a good excuse.  
  
Like any normal day, you follow him home from school, three steps behind him, never closer, where there's too much risk of getting your toes stomped on or suffocating in his flawlessness, and never farther, where there's too much risk of falling back and losing him until the next morning when he doesn't answer your calls or texts as a method of shaming you for your failure. But instead of feeling the splitting heartache carve through your chest when you must leave him at the corner and walk down the block alone to your own apartment, you are blessed with the privilege of staying by his side, like the right-hand man you want to be, for the entire duration of his walk home, from school to front door, and beyond.  
  
He never told you what kind of homework it was; most of your classes are together, something you planned strategically, taking electives you had no interest in just to get a seat beside his, but you have two where you are apart in which he could have gotten homework that he didn't elaborate on the subject of. But when you try to ask him, he interrupts you and changes the topic to something else. You don't find the heart to reprimand him, or to scold him for caring so little about your feelings for him, the ones that only seem to get stronger and stronger with every passing day you spend with him, because he has a right, in some way, not to be forced to disclose anything to you.  
  
And that's fine with you.  
  
As long as he is there, you'll be complete.

You're familiar with this place, so familiar that his parents don't question you when you follow him inside and down the hallway. Being an only child, the result of an aging father and a mother with fickle health, traits that made them incapable of producing more than one viable child together, he has his own room in his apartment, the apartment which is much nicer than your own, given that his family is richer than yours could ever hope to be. He leads you up into his bedroom and tosses his backpack on the desk in the corner. Then he shuts the door, and you hear the lock twist into place with a click as he closes you both in.

You can't shake the suspicion that none of this is about homework, and it never was.

He puts a hand on your shoulder from behind, touching you with a warmth and a fondness you've never seen from him before, one that seems to flow right from his skin, through the fabric of your sleeve, and into you, and then, he speaks words you didn't think would ever come out of his mouth in such a context.

He asks if you want to try something.

You don't care what it is, because you know already what he's talking about, and you want it more than you've ever wanted anything in your life. It's such a beautiful trick that he's played on you, dragging you here under false pretenses only to surprise you with something you've always needed.

When you mumble out that you do, voice strangled away by the fear of his parents overhearing you about to do what you're planning to and separating you two, friends since childhood, to keep you from 'corrupting' him, he takes you by the wrist and seats you on his bed with a crooked smile and a crazed glint in his eyes that makes you think he wants to tear you into pieces and eat you alive. You wouldn't really mind if he did.

He sits down next to you, and presses his mouth tight over yours in an over-possessive, needy kiss; inside, you explode in a surge of lava and fireworks and every sensation you know, and some new ones you've never felt before. His heat engulfs you from the inside out, and against your palms, his broad chest and wide shoulders are solid as brick. You've craved this for so long, and never had the courage to tell him, and now, out of nowhere, he's brought it all to you at once, allowing you to hurdle neatly over the walls that could have kept you apart forever and made your entire life feel like an utter waste.

He pulls away to nibble the flesh of your neck, your earlobes, right where he knows, as if by instinct, that you're sensitive, and that touching you there will work you up, and you moan, low and deep in your throat, feeling too much and not enough all, all at once. It was so sudden, so jarring, for him to do this, but you wouldn't expect anything less from someone like him. He is dynamic, ebbing and flowing and shifting and changing, morphing into something better than you ever could have even imagined every time you think you have him memorized. 

Then he runs his fingertips along your collar, and you can  _feel_  your little cock hardening down between your legs. You're young, and easily excited, two traits that are as inseparable from each other as you have been from him, but his presence amplifies what you'd normally feel around other boys into something far more intense, far more striking than what you typically have felt.

The motions of him stripping you down, drawing you out of your jeans and into a long, sinewy line for him to hover over, blend into the motions of him kissing you, until you can't determine where to separate them from each other; the motions of you fiddling with the button on his pants to wrestle them down his thighs and forcing down the zipper on his jacket blend into the motions of you kissing him until they meet the exact same fate.

Soon, he is propping you back up, seating you next to him, and letting you slip off his boxers so you can allow the bulge bound beneath the fabric spring free. And when you do, when his gorgeous member is freed only to be enslaved by your hand, you jerk him and tug him, palm slick along his warm, firm shaft as you rub him off as you would yourself. He's much larger than you are, better endowed there, too, just as he has been gifted by nature in almost everything else, so your wrist quickly begins to throb with spurts of dull agony, you can't bring yourself to stop. Aching muscles and a sore arm is such a small price to pay for this.

He lets a small moan escape his lips, and you take this as an order to go faster, harder, stronger. Gay as you are, you've never given anyone a handjob before, not that you'd want to give one to anyone but him, and you swore it'd be much more difficult than jacking off, given that you can't ride the high of the pleasure that keeps your arm moving long after it should be limp with exhaustion, and that you can't gauge how your motions feel. But, as always, he seems to share your brain, have some connection to it that he uses to telepathically guide your hand wherever it needs to go, which is, right now, and at any point of your life, wherever he  _wants_  it to go.  
  
There is silence, for a few minutes, the only sounds penetrating the stillness the smacking of flesh against flesh and the occasional whimper from him as you make him feel so, so good, brushing your fingers over every twitching, starving nerve as you fuck his hardened cock through your hand, but he cries out to you when he feels his climax approaching. You can tell by the way his shoulders tense, and by how inflamed his stiff tool, the one that should be down your throat or stretching your virgin asshole wide enough to fit several more cocks inside, has become, a fiery ruby red at the head, with a purple tinge along his slit, which weeps a string of precum, and by the desperation in his shining eyes as he orders you through his existence alone to make him finish.  
  
He presses a hand against your bare thigh; it's then you see the way his pink lips, shining with drips of moisture, have parted open to allow him the mercy of the rushed, hungry breaths that will sustain him through the greatest gift of your devotion. He's never experienced this before, not from you, but you swear to yourself that once the aftershocks of it all have faded away, and he can think rationally again, he will recognize what he's just been given as the primary, or perhaps, only, thing that you should mean to him.  
  
You know you were crafted for this, to serve him this way. It is your purpose, your meaning. All you must do now is get him to know it, too.  
  
Faster, you pump him in, out, in, out, until he's squirming under your touch and squealing out clusters of high-pitched whines. You're doing this. You're being good to him. That thought keeps you drawing forward, further, until finally, finally, after so, so long, he lets out one last breathy call of your name, halfway between a shriek and a purr, and you are built and destroyed and repaired again all at once.  
  
His cum shoots over the pale, mottled skin lining your hand, in spurts, one after another, until you come to a stop a few moments after they do and allow his still-pulsating cock to flop limp back onto his thigh. Though you have the skin tone of a caveman who hasn't left the back of his home for a decade, the streaks of cum seem white even against you, and your freckles certainly don't do anything to lessen the contrast.  
  
Before you have the chance to meet his eyes again, and see his judgement, or his disappointment, or his anger at you for leaving it there, for not finishing everything off with one final act of lustful adoration, you run your tongue over your knuckles, around your fingers, down the inside of your palm, and marvel at the heat, the salt, the weight, in your mouth, against your teeth, and, after a moment of holding it there to savor the bitter flavors of  _him_ , inside your throat as you greedily suck it down, like a parasite feasting upon his blood. And in a way, that's just what you are. A filthy little parasite who deserves none of what he's just let you have, but who will ride his beauty anyway, until he's dead or drained dry, and perhaps, even after that.  
  
When you glance back to him again and meet his gaze, you're not sure what's going to happen next, not sure what to expect him to do. You've only seen so many movies, and only they gave you an example of what happens after a handjob for someone who isn't your male best friend, and even if that had been a trope, you doubt you'd still have any idea what to predict from the unpredictable Peter Hayes, god amongst gods.  
  
He says nothing of importance, nothing world-shattering, just swipes the tip of his tongue neatly over his lips before repeating your name one more time under his breath, somehow managing to stumble over the single syllable, before placing a quick kiss onto your forehead.  
  
You cuddle him there, thankful for his warmth and the solid bulges of his muscles to keep you safe, protected from the scary world around you, the world that might not have him there, at your side, forever.  
  
It hits you then, deep in the gut, stirring, hatching, unfurling, blooming petal by petal into something bigger, that he's in love with you, the same way you've always been with him, and that feeling that fogs up every inch of your existence, until what little desire you once had to think of anything but him is clouded away, makes your chest stir into wild flurries of beats. He's so kind to you. He owes you nothing, but here he is, paying you back.

You've always known you were in love with him, but right now, you've fallen in love all over again, twice as strong as the first time.

After that afternoon you spent exploring each other, that afternoon you had your first kiss and both gave and received your first handjob, your first fingering, and your first blowjob, that afternoon you parted with reddened lips that matched his almost exactly in color, he becomes very handsy with you, and you're flattered by it, in a way that you can't really put into words. He's always touching you now, your hands, your shoulders, and, once, during gym, when nobody is watching, he grabs your ass and gives it a good, firm squeeze that makes you bite back a yelp of surprise.

He grabbed your butt, and it wasn't a joke, or a way of toying with you! You're not half as attractive as he is, and when he can do so much better, he wants  _you_ , of all people!

He wants  _you_!

If you clung to him like a ball of lint to a used dryer sheet before, you're practically fused to him now. And, for once, he returns the sentiment, though not quite with the intensity you carry. 

Sometimes, during a particularly interesting lesson, when no one else is looking anywhere but at the teacher, he taps a finger on your desk to get your attention, and then, once he knows your pale, innocent eyes are focused on him, he slides his hand down beneath his waistband, and that is when you notice the lump perking up under the fabric of his pants, and the stirrings of pulsating heat building in your own dick at the sight of it all. He rubs himself off, and once you're hard, it doesn't take long for you to join in on the surreptitious act of lust directed toward you.

There's something you find so erotic in being connected together like that, in the times when no one else knows what you're doing, sharing something, alone together, and that makes you his little follower, beloved by him, and spoiled with his overwhelming adoration.

Furthermore, around you in private, at least, he refers to you as his boyfriend, or, sometimes, when you're touching each other, and he's too high off his own impending orgasm to remember his own name, let alone yours, his little princess. That's a sign that all of the hints that could have been explained away as casual experimental contact between two friends suffering in the cusp of puberty were truly meaningful. In fact, it has such an impact that it's less like a sign and more like a statement.

You give him your virginity in a matter of weeks. There's nothing shameful or easy about it; you've known him since you were babies, and when the Westermarck effect failed to kick in, you may as well have been dating for sixteen years without fucking once, making this a consummation of your relationship and a confirmation of your love for each other and not an act of ignorant promiscuity.

He invites you over again, under the guise of doing homework, as he did before, and instead of asking you if you're horny for him, a virtual guarantee, or waiting for you to kiss him first, the moment the door is latched and your clothes have been ripped off your body, he heaves you onto his bed, lifts your legs up to introduce your wrinkled little backdoor to the world, and leaves you there, cold and sex-starved, your sweet pucker open and begging for him, while he goes to find something to use as lubricant.

When you were fingered by him before, when he dabbed his index finger, and then, his middle finger, too, into your excited cunt, he had used saliva, the first convenient fluid to acquire in the urgency of the moment, and you'd found when you were repeating the same process on him that it was inadequate. You figure he's trying to rectify that mistake, and make up for that uninformed error.

He's stomping and banging and slamming around so loudly that you have to bite your lip to fight away the worries of his parents walking in and seeing you in such a compromising position, one that would leave no doubt in their mind, at any level of denial, that their son was the worst thing possible to them, a  _faggot_ , and not only that, but a faggot in love with  _another_ faggot. Even your misplaced pride in who you are, gay since birth, attracted to other boys with every single word you speak, every single thought you think, you can't help but believe that, if his love for himself was victimized,  _your_ love for him would be eviscerated out of shame alongside it, even if he won the war and emerged a veteran as self-confident as any other time.

But when he returns for you, dismisses you from your god-given duty of staring at your pale feet and shins as they hover above you, and at the wooden cap of the ceiling that separates you  ~~~~from the sky above, your uncertainty squirms away, first slowly, gradually, and then, all at once. You watch with a rising interest as he squirts something from a black bottle into his palm, and while you're not sure what it is, you can't feel anything but apathy towards all that isn't his fingers or his cock pressing into the hole that belongs to him and him alone.

He stretches you out with his hand for a while, easing inside you with a tenderness you didn't expect to feel from him, one that ensures every inch of your hot, slimy tunnel is ready for his huge dick inside of it, and then, he adds a little more of the floral-smelling lubricant directly into your hole before grabbing his cock around the thick base and ramming it in, rough, like he's grown too frustrated with waiting to hold back any longer.

Your innocence has left you; he is the one who owns it, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

That orgasm, birthed through his humping of your swollen prostate and his jerking of your stiffened wood, is the best of your entire life; the planet shudders on its axis, consumed in its entirety by  _him_  and his moaning and his thrusting and how he seems to hold you still under waves of unmatched euphoria, and your legs quiver from knee to toe, and your palms sweat, and all you're able to feel is the echo of him as it engulfs your body.

When he finally pulls out and cums onto your belly, and you wipe it up and lap it off your fingers like the overdependent dog you are, he collapses next to you, pulls you close, and then, after a brief silence which eats away at you like it's forever, he whispers in your ear that, next time, he wants to bottom for you, so you can take his ass the way he just took yours.

If you were addicted to his sex before, that statement, that single statement, makes your addiction incurable, a malignant tumor that rapes and pillages the rest of your sexual identity into nothingness until your entire sexuality revolves around him.

You were infatuated with him before, but, now, you spend every waking moment fantasizing about him kissing you, making love to you, about him taking you somewhere pretty to propose to you, and you giving him the only answer you've ever been able to give him, and him marrying you in a matter of months before he whisks you away so that you may pamper him for the rest of time, making sure he never has to move or do anything uncomfortable unless he wants to.

When you aren't together, you're probably texting him, or at least having him cross your mind, and the afternoon forays into the privacy of his room become so frequent that you enter a routine of fasting all day so that you can always be prepared for a good, long session of being fucked like you're his baby girl, as he likes to call you. 

But one day, when you're particularly excited about seeing him, about having to throw your hand over his lips to muffle away his shrieks of pleasure as he rides your shaft, about getting to kiss him and touch him and talk until it gets dark afterward, he shuts the door behind you, and, instead of pressing his lips to yours, or grabbing you by the hips, or telling you he's not in the mood and he'd rather lie around and just spend some time with you, he lets you down gently, as gentle as someone like him can be, telling you he's scared and ashamed and doesn't want to be with you anymore. It's an open display of weakness. He is weak, just like you. He has fears, and faults, and even after all you've done, he's going to let them overrule his love for you. After all you gave him, now that he has  _everything you had to give_ , he's going to throw you away out of terror like the coward he is.

You tell him it's okay, but it's not, and you leave before you can explain yourself any further.  
  
You fell in love with him quicker than anything; it was like walking along a trail, enjoying the birdsong of the forest, when your foot hit a hole that had been covered with leaves and left you sprawled in the bottom of a pit you had no way of escaping. Wanting him from the sidelines was like lying there, leg twisted, tongue swollen from dehydration, vision blurred and dizzied as you begged for the comforting release of death. Him telling you that he loved you for the very first time was like him picking you up by the shoulders and freeing you, only to carry you in his arms to a tent and nurse you back to health when you thought he was going to abandon you again.  
  
Falling out of love with him comes even faster, but it's not a tidy thing you can describe in concrete terms, not something you can dress beneath the flowery confines of a metaphor and write exactly how it kills you inside on it in big black letters. You feel hurt, and anger, and burning, blazing resentment that carves your chest in two right in the fleshy pad where your collarbone and sternum meet. You cry, a lot, sometimes in public, but mostly in private, where no one can see you. Private, the place he first confessed his love to you. You can barely stand to be alone anymore; the memories seem to want to stab you, hang you up like a gutted buck, and drain your lifeblood back into the earth below.  
  
You stop jerking off. Being a teenage boy with raging hormones and a deep hunger for the homosexual experimentation that, until he touched you and kissed you and validated everything you felt for him, you could not act upon in real life, you used to jerk off religiously, at least once a day, if not twice, and sometimes, if you couldn't get your mind off him, or if you'd had a particularly nice day together and you were too drunk on him to sleep, more than that. But you could never get off without him, whether he be in your fantasies or right in front of you, and the frustration when you aren't even teetering on the edge of your climax after you spend hours struggling to get there soon outweighs your willingness to try. Besides, imagining those glimmering green eyes, the color of summer leaves and twice as vibrant as two meticulously polished peridots could ever hope to be, seems to make bile rise in your throat as you recall all you've lost in him.  
  
And with that sexual frustration comes frustration everywhere else. Perched on your back like a looming gargoyle, claws glinting, stone fangs bared, is the knowledge that you're gaining weight, that the only friends you had don't speak to you anymore, that you hate yourself and you want to die for being the mistake you are. You carry that monster everywhere, and the only time the hulking load that rests upon you ever seems to relent is when you're asleep, eating, or cutting.  
  
You cut now. You started doing it so that you would have a method to cope with what he'd done to you, during the times when you're too nervous about your weight to binge eat. You like to watch the blood oozing down the deep, fleshy slits you mark into your skin. You like being able to manifest your agony into something real, something tangible, something that no one can ignore no matter how hard they try. You like to punish yourself for not being good enough for him, for neglecting your purpose in life, which, until recently, was to please him. You cut because you've lost what little ambition you had to become someone, and because you lost him, when he  _was_  your ambition.

And you get stared at a lot. You're not sure if it's because he told everyone about you, because you're getting so fat so quickly that no one recognizes you anymore, because you don't have the motivation to even bother covering your arms, because you neglect to shave or brush your hair or dress properly anymore, because you aren't following him, or a combination of all those factors, but you can hear the whispers about you, the whispers about your thickening thighs and the way your shirts cling to your bloated belly and how you can't walk up stairs without your freckled face turning bright red as you struggle for air, the whispers about your budding mustache that looks more like it belongs on a middle-aged pedophile than an adolescent boy and the shine of grease in your unkempt orange hair and how you wear the same outfit for days at a time, the whispers about the scabbed pink lines running over your wrists and the blood staining the underside of your nails and that you make no attempt whatsoever to hide any of it, and the whispers about what he told everyone, that you're gay, that you held him down so he couldn't fight back and tried to molest him, that you have a list of boys from school that you want to fuck you hard in the ass.

But, really, in the grand scheme of things, you don't care. No one matters to you but him, not your peers mocking you right to your face, shunning you by refusing to touch you or sit next to you, warning each other that you're going to rape someone and pass your damage onto them, not your teachers' actions, not the actions of strangers, not anyone's sympathy or cruelty or obliviousness. Your doctor's concern when your evening ritual of comfort eating until you can't breathe while your mother is at work gets you well over two hundred pounds at a modest height doesn't ruffle you. Nor do the tears of horror that brim in your mother's eyes when she first catches sight of your cutting scars, and her prayers to God, spoken after she thinks you are asleep, for him to cure you, which are phrased so unspecifically that you would swear, if she knew about it, that she was talking about your homosexuality and not your weight or your self-harming or your myriad of other issues, don't do anything but feed the pressurized guilt building inside you. You can't change, because the only reaction that could spur you to stop spiraling into self-destruction is  _his_ , and he has not even so much as glanced toward you since he left you.  
  
And despite the amount of people noticing you, and despite there being a few of them who were close enough to you to be legitimately concerned for your mental health now, no one seems to put together him not talking to you anymore and you breaking down. It is as if he never existed, and you have always been a nervous, sloppy, obese, friendless loner.   
  
But he's definitely there. Every once in a great while, given that you're sure now that he's intentionally attempting to avoid you, you catch his gaze in the hallway, or during class, and your heart melts into a slurry of warmth, birthing a smile you can't shake for the rest of the day.  
  
Perhaps falling out of love wasn't the right term to use to describe what happened between you and him. If anything, you love him even more now that he's gone, like him hating you makes him even more alluring. You can't stand to think about him, but you won't ever reject a brief glance at his beauty.  
  
With all the ways you've changed and morphed into someone even more unattractive and unstable and overdependent than the person you were when he was with you, you don't expect him to come back, not now, not ever, not as a friend and certainly not as a lover. Death seems so kind, compared to the possibility of never knowing his companionship again, and sometimes you think about cutting yourself deep enough that you'll bleed out, or hanging yourself with a belt, or just walking off one day and stepping out in front of an eighteen-wheeler.  
  
But you're afraid.  
  
Not that you'll survive, not that you'll wake up in the hospital with your wrists bandaged, not that you've become too overweight to hang yourself without falling down and attracting too much attention, not that you'll be left crippled but very much alive and more of an ostracized social pariah than before, if such a state is possible at this point.  
  
No, you're afraid to even try. And if you weren't, you don't have the energy to do much more than lie around and sigh and struggle. There's no amount of effort you could physically put in to even attempt to muster up the courage to end everything you've ever known.  
  
So you carry on, left with no choice but to wallow in your own self-loathing and express your misery only through your two destructive outlets. You carry on for forever, when minutes become hours, hours become days, days become weeks, weeks become months, and months become years, decades, centuries. It's not very long in the world outside of your mind, you think, since Peter dumped you like the garbage you are; the date is familiar in your mind, worn in like someone engraved it. The worst day of your life. The day everything changed.  
  
It was in November, you recall.  
  
It's March now.  
  
That's a short time. If you live a full seventy-seven years, which, right now, is unfathomable to you, given your plans for suicide and your rapid weight gain, both things that may have fatal consequences sooner rather than later, you'll experience a period that long well over two hundred times. It's so short, so fickle, and yet, it feels so long, like you've been suffering through your state of stationary agony for millennia, over and over to cross years innumerable. You feel older than you should be, too old,  _ancient_. And yet, you're still the same age you were back then. You've changed, but nothing else has.  
  
That is terrifying.  
  
If you could have anything, it would be a hug from him, his arms tight and solid around you to protect you from the horrors birthed by your own mind. You think back to the time he first let you touch him, the time that opened the gate for all of your joy at having him, and all this immense suffering from losing him, too.  He'd held you so tender back then, and you'd seemed to share a mind, a heart, a soul that radiated through your connected bodies. You felt like he understood you, and like he'd be there forever, your perfect soulmate.  
  
The only problem with that  _is_  that he is your soulmate.  
  
And you aren't his.  
  
You weren't born a girl.

And that's what he is looking for.  
  
You think back to that a lot more often than you'd like. Sometimes it inspires you to daydream about cutting your cock off, losing your main identification as a boy, and presenting as a girl to steal his heart again. You'd hate it, every moment, and you'd feel trapped, but he'd be there to free you, and that would make you a thousand times more free than you are now. He'd save you, as he's always done. You'd be happy.  
  
Instead of listening in class, something you haven't done in a very long time, since he sits so close to you in most of them, and that gives you the perfect opportunity to imagine you're still his sweetheart, you now stare at the wall and break away, retracting yourself into that specific fantasy.  
  
It gets more and more real every time. It'd be so simple. You'd just take a butcher knife out of the block, get comfortable on your bed, spread your legs, and hack your stupid appendage right off, using thoughts of him to soldier through the pain that could be no worse than not having him. You don't think that's how the professionals do it, but all you care about is getting him to like you, and if it takes self-mutilation masquerading as an amateur sex-change operation to achieve that, you're more than willing to try it. Then you'd gouge a little pussy into the space your balls once occupied, using your flayed-open sack to make the big, juicy lips that would get him hard when you rubbed them along his shaft as a tease, and once you got the bleeding to stop, you could pad out one of your mother's bras and dress in her clothes. With some eyeshadow and a wig, you'd end up unrecognizable.  
  
You'd find him outside his family's apartment, sitting on the sidewalk, and strut up to him exuding a bold confidence that implied you'd met before, and that would be because you already had. But between your caked-on whore make-up and your skimpy dress and your high heels and your direct avoidance of eye contact with him, he'd never know. Not until you wanted him to, when it was already too late and he'd fallen back in love with you.  
  
You'd bat your eyelashes like a doe-eyed 60s bombshell, and giggle and grab his hand and do everything to flirt with him that you couldn't do as Drew without making him angry, embarrassing yourself, or both. You'd sandwich compliment after compliment into your conversation, seeking to flatter him by dwelling on the way his biceps bulged to stretch the sleeves of his too-tight button-up shirt taut, and the way his cheekbones jutted out, defined under his skin, and the way his eyes, your favorite part of him, shined like two bottomless pits somehow filled to overflowing with glinting shards of jade.  
  
When he started flirting back, smiling and laughing and meeting your gaze a little too long for it to be platonic, you'd seek to turn him on, taking a seat on his lap to press your soft, throbbing folds against his thigh and mottle his collar with ruby lipstick. You'd make him so horny that he couldn't resist you, and he'd invite you inside and take you up to his room, the same place you'd first had sex with him as a boy. Only after you'd gotten him undressed, with the throbbing dick that had once been yours to suck and rub and fuck rigid and aching for your hole to pound, would you strip and reveal your secret.  
  
He'd recognize you immediately, but instead of pulling away, disgusted, he'd spot your hungry little pussy and throw you on the bed before you could even register the lust in his eyes. He'd grab your legs, fingers greedy, hungry, probing every inch of your flesh, and he'd spread you open so he could rip you open with his massive member until you bled and screamed and tore, split from your empty sack down to your sensitive little back entry in a torrent of blood and agony.  
  
But you'd like it. You'd want more, as long as he wanted more. That would be worth it all.  
  
One evening, when you feel particularly lonely without him in your mother's empty, silent apartment, and you are filling the void by lying naked while cutting lines into your shin and eating copious amounts of bread, you almost bring your irrational desire into reality. Your cock is tiny and flaccid and underused; all it would take would be a slice over your skin and then a few good hacks with the blade's sharp edge, and you would be his sex-crazed little girl. Your hands shake, trembling hard enough to nearly knock the knife from your palm. Maybe it's time.  
  
But the monotonous squealing of your ringtone, blaring from across the room, makes the decision for you. You heave yourself to your feet.  
  
Between the lump of dough sitting in your stomach, swelling it out rounder than it already is, if that's even possible, and your weight itself, you find it a bit of a struggle to move; your breaths are shallow, and while, normally, your gut is soft and easy to navigate around, your gorging has ballooned it into one temporary solid mass that presses against your lungs and makes it difficult to even rise from the couch beneath you.

As you steady yourself, a rush of warmth oozes down your ankle. You forgot about your cuts. They feel like nothing, now, unless you go particularly deep, or in an especially sensitive area. When you were born, and until you were six, your mother had a dog, and you never knew that dogs had a smell to them. But as soon as Thunder passed on, you noticed the musky stink of dog whenever one crossed your path. To normal people, people who don't cope with suffering like you do, pain is intense. But you've gone blind to it, and you feel only numbness. Now it is the motions and the sight of the punishment you are receiving for your failures that gets you off on what you do.

The music screams louder, calling you, calling you; you rarely get phone calls, and when you do, you generally check who they are and then ignore them, but there's something clenching deep in your overtaxed chest, a sensation like your ribcage is caving in upon itself, and you can't bring yourself to do anything but move forward and answer.

When you lumber to the coffee table on the opposite side of the room, where you threw your phone, your backpack, and your clothes when you got back from school, you get to pick up your phone and check who the call is from.

It's him.

_Him._

You don't think you're seeing straight at first. Would he even give you the dignity of calling you by accident? You know you're going crazy, that all of the self-destruction is a sign of severe mental illness that is only being expanded upon by your mother's adamant belief in God healing all ailments, but you didn't think it was  _this_  kind of mental illness, the kind that's like a perpetual bad trip on rotten magic mushrooms, where you see things that you shouldn't be seeing and hallucinate disjointed strings of images and screams and people. You're so curious that you have to answer, even though you're aware your voice will be frail from disuse and that you'll have nothing interesting to say to make up for it.

You greet him like it's the first time you've ever greeted someone—eager but unsteady, delighted but tentative.

The response you expect is confusion, or anger; maybe he called you up just to tell you that he thinks you're a faggot and that he hopes you finally man up for long enough to remove your own pathetic existence from the world. You expect him to threaten you, or brag that no one knows that he did as much back to you as he's accusing you of doing to him, if not more.

You expect anything but what you get.

He sniffles out that he's sorry he's ruined your life. He tells you that he knows what you do to yourself at night, and that he knows you didn't just coincidentally decide you liked pizza and lying around like a slug on a cabbage around the time he dumped you. He's crying by the time he tells you that the rumor he spread about you was a way of deflecting his own sexual insecurities onto you.

He tells you that he still loves you and he always has.

The naïvety from before he played you is absent. Now, it is misanthropy, justified misanthropy, after the way you were abused and mistreated by an entire school. You don't believe him, not for a second.

But you want to.

And that is enough.

Throat parched to scales, vision blurred, fingers quivering, you tell him that he's forgiven, and that you loved him even when he was hurting you.

He asks if he can come over.

You say to him only what he wants to hear.

With an energy filling you that you haven't felt since he broke up with you, you wait by the door. In your head echoes on repeat your screaming renditions of epic after epic describing his otherworldly beauty. You can't wait to see him again. When he gets here, you're going to press your lips to his the very exact moment you see the sun shimmering over the dark tufts of his hair. You're going to wrap your arms tight around his waist and sob into his chest about how much you've missed him, how much it broke you when he left.

But you don't really expect him to arrive.

After all he's done to hurt you, and with the state you're in, physically, emotionally, do you have anything to breathe but your misguided hope? If he shows up, and the call wasn't another attempt by him to manipulate your emotions for his own entertainment, then you're more than happy to be wrong about him, but what chance is there? You're so damaged, so hurt, and all by him. It's not a question of if he'll arrive, but now, if he does, if he'll be able to fix you, and if he'll reduce himself to being at your side to try.

You park your fat ass back on the couch, next to your knife and your razors and your food. God, you're disgusting. Why would  _he_ , the bravest, strongest, most handsome person you know, ever want to come back to this, even for a second, even out of pity? You were no beauty before, but now, you can't even remember looking in the mirror and not being repulsed by deep, scabbed-over gashes lazily covered up with gauze pads and angry red stretch marks and the fat bags under your eyes like someone drew on your face with a purple marker. You've never been a skeptic, and never one for disbelief, especially in him, in his perfection, but this can't be real. He's not stupid enough to pick you up when your battle scars have left you so ugly and so past repair.

But there's a knock on the door, and though you assume he's brought a gang of new friends to beat you up, sodomize you with a big stick, and leave you curled up for your mother to find you injured in a puddle of your own blood, wheezing under the impacts of fists and words and betrayals, you open the door anyway. If it means he'll share your proximity, even if only for a moment, you're more than willing to suffer. It's no worse than what you've felt already.

His voice is hushed when he first speaks to you, and his eyes, his gorgeous, striking, distinctive dark green eyes, sparkle with the buds of newborn tears. His cheeks are a bright, fleshy pink. Oh, you've missed him, missed him so dearly, missed him with an intensity you never knew until you saw him like this again, and to know he's remorseful, and regrets what's been done to you, is a gift too wonderful to take all at once.

You talk for a while, like nothing ever happened between you, but without letting him in; he doesn't ask, and you're too caught up in his smile and how it exposes the smooth surfaces of his clean, straight teeth, just as beautiful as the rest of him, to say anything to open the question.

There's not much you can choke out beyond the things platonic buddies, unblemished by the memories of past affairs, would discuss. You think neither of you want to bring it up, all the things you said to each other, all the things you  _did_  to each other. He took your virginity, stole your innocence from you, but that's something best left to weigh down the air around you, at least for now, despite that you want nothing more than to tell him how much it means to you that he was your first fuck all the way back when you two were still in love. You want him to know that you'd give anything to, for one last time, be his pride, his health, his beauty, his strength.

As always, almost, with that one glaring exception that tore you two apart so long ago, he is stronger than you, and you are the one to be requested to allow him in.

You both sit on the couch and continue your chat, interspersed with profuse apologies from both sides. He already knows about your habits, everyone does, but you feel the hot breath of shame crawling through the skin on your cheeks as he surveys your stash of coping mechanisms, stone-faced and wholly unshaken by what shakes you, even after all this time, and what should shake him. Maybe he's judging you. You want to describe how, at your worst, you'd make so many shallow cuts along your limbs that you'd bleed until you felt disoriented and lightheaded, how, at your worst, you were putting on a pound and a half a day, how, at your worst, you couldn't find sleep over the insatiable urges to steal a car and drive into a brick wall, how, at your worst, you cried inside for him every waking moment of your life, living as a zombie who moved and talked but did not think, not of anything but him.

You want to describe how you were at your worst without him, at your worst until he came, but now that he's here, you're at your best in months. You want to describe, detail by detail, smudge of color by smudge of color, how his laughter is taking every piece of you in its warm hands and mending you back into someone whole and complete, someone you haven't seen since before he went away. 

But you can't say any of that, so when he whispers something suspect to what he's about to do, puts his hand on your shoulder, and leans in to kiss you, you tell him by leaning in, too, until your lips meet and your mouth is hard over his, the same way you kissed him so long ago, the way you kissed him while he bent your legs up over his shoulders and made love to you like he truly meant it all.

His hungry squeaks are fervent, blazing with the passion you swore he'd lost for you already. You know you'd give the world to be his little sweetheart again, but until now, the possibility of him even speaking a single word to you, let alone wanting to escort you places and throw his arm over your shoulders and hold and kiss you in public, was like a fairy tale. But now the idea is all too rational, an outcome approaching faster than you know how to react to it. 

His wet, warm mouth is just as you remember it, unchanged from your very last kiss. It takes you back to times much simpler than this, where you knew who you loved and had no other concerns to focus your worry on; for that long, it's all not true, an abstract conglomeration of possible negative outcomes. You're still thin and healthy. Your arms and legs and belly and feet are uninjured, unmarked by the scattered mess of red and pink you now see. More than anything, you want to live, want to grow up and go to college and start a family with him. For that long, you know you'll always be his baby boy, no matter what happens. For that long, nothing is wrong.

And when he pulls away to breathe, you predict you'll feel fat and ugly and useless again, but you don't, because he's with you, at your side, with admiration and love fading out of every breath he takes to swaddle your senses, and that makes you feel perfect. 

Things go further, further than you thought they ever would again with  _anyone_ , let alone  _him_  and the unequaled perfection that makes you come back to him even when he's responsible for ruining your mind, your body, your life, and soon, he's sprawled out on his hands and knees, twitching hole quivering open to take you inside. You slide your forearms under his biceps and lean across his back, trusting that he's strong enough to take you even with your added weight, and thrust as hard as you can, trying with a sudden power you haven't felt in forever to make him happy. You're kissing the nape of his neck, behind his ears, around his shoulders, while he lets out scream after scream of the unequaled satisfaction felt only by a boy receiving a good ass-fucking, the kind you've heard only in highly glamorized and exaggerated pornography.

When you both finish, and he crumples to snuggle against you, to wrap your arms around you and make you feel cherished, he says, in a harsh, heavy tone you can't negotiate with, that he wants to call you his boyfriend again.

You don't say anything, just leave another line of kisses over the jut of his collarbone.

Everyone at school still thinks you're a pervert, and probably a future rapist, but now that you follow him around, and, for what they know, he actually accepts you as a friend, you're left alone. No one teases you, or gives you a hard time, outside of the confused glares when they see you and him together after what he alleged you did, and the occasional rumor that stirs about your sexual desires.

Cutting isn't as addictive as you thought it would be. With him at your side, you have the motivation to stop, and with the exception of a few relapses, the worst of which being where, after failing a big test, you slit open your thighs with a straight razor and had to walk around with an infected gash spitting gooey, yellowish slime mixed with blood clots into your pant leg for a few weeks, you stop completely, owner of the confidence necessary to drop your crutches and run free on your mended legs.

When you manage to stop binging, which is considerably harder, given that you're used to inhaling massive amounts of sugar and fat every night, and your body cries for more every time you attempt to eat normally, the weight falls off faster than you know how to deal with it. You used to be able to see it in his eyes when you were naked together that, though he loved you enough to take you back, he found you unattractive, but that dissipated by the end of summer, when you drop the equivalent of a very small woman or a large fourth-grader to reach the size that was normal for your old stocky frame by eating a little bit less than you did before you lost control over yourself. 

By the time you both go back to school, he tells you that he's proud of you for being so able to rebound from the consequences of his mistakes, and, sometimes, he holds your hand when you're walking together in places where others can see and judge, on your way to school, under your desks where your classmates can see and your teacher can't, and, generally, anywhere he pleases. He's so popular, or, perhaps, feared, for his harsh words and general cruelty, the same traits that he destroyed you with, that no one dares say a word about it, the way they would if you were with anyone but him. Even more sporadically, though it does nothing to lessen the impact, he'll kiss you on the forehead, or on the cheek, if you two need to part ways or he's feeling particularly affectionate and appreciative of you.

You're so in love now that you're sure it will kill you, whether by your own hand or through the bloodlust of your broken heart, if he rejects you again. That's a disastrous possibility you know is too real, so you regulate yourself, never saying or doing anything that could conceivably have a negative outcome with him. It's a sad existence, but not as sad as the one you lead without him. With him, anything can be portrayed as normal to you.

No, that isn't quite right.

With him, anything  _is_  normal.


End file.
